Naomi Wolf Sparks Another Debate (on Sex, of Course)

Naomi Wolf is the author of the book “Vagina.” Her book has come under critical attack.Credit
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

“WHO gets to say it? Who gets to own it? Who gets to say what happens to it?”

Naomi Wolf is talking about her vagina. So are scores of other people, though they are mainly talking about “Vagina,” her new book, and the talk has been nearly universally damning.

“A shoddy piece of work, full of childlike generalizations and dreary, feminist auto-think,” wrote Zoë Heller in The New York Review of Books. Ariel Levy asked in The New Yorker, “Is it going too far to say that Ms. Wolf’s book, which clearly belongs to the same realm of the erotic imagination as the Grey trilogy, is itself a kind of pornography?”

Meghan Daum wrote in her column in The Los Angeles Times that “Vagina” is “bad news for everybody who has one,” while in her 2,700-word excoriation in The New York Times Book Review, Toni Bentley called it “scattered” and “humorless.”

About the only solid defense of the book seems to come from a yet-unpublished piece to which Ms. Wolf alerted this reporter, in the British lesbian magazine Diva (“truly liberating,” wrote its author).

A few days after reviews began appearing, Ms. Wolf set sliced bananas and strawberries upon a coffee table (cut fruit had never before looked so vulval) and took a seat on the deep, plush couch in the yellow-painted living room of her sunny West Village apartment. She was wearing a flowing black wrap over a loose knit tank, tan strappy heels and a tight smile.

“I’m a big believer in debate and difference of opinion,” she said of the critical roar. No doubt this is true, as Ms. Wolf courts debate weekly in the column she writes for The Guardian, as she has with her seven previous books. The Rhodes scholar who two decades ago wrote in “The Beauty Myth,” the book that made her a media star, that “it does not matter in the least what women look like as long as we feel beautiful,” is herself as gorgeous as ever, two months shy of her 50th birthday.

She said she thinks of “Vagina” as the last in a quartet, answering questions about science, anatomy, freedom and pleasure that she also addressed in “The Beauty Myth” (1990), “Promiscuities” (1998) and “Misconceptions” (2001). And like those last two books, which were inspired by her struggles with coming of age and motherhood, respectively, she draws from her sex life in “Vagina” to talk about how women are starved of the kind of pleasure they want.

“It’s not about hot sex, it’s about not being taken for granted,” she said. “These things are related. I now understand why I don’t want to make love if the house is messy.”

Ms. Wolf has often been ahead of the zeitgeist, writing in “Promiscuities” about hookup culture before it sported that name, and natural childbirth before it came back into vogue. But in recent years her perch in the cultural firmament has been somewhat shakier.

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She was pilloried for her high-paid gig with Al Gore (though few today might disagree with her advice to go “alpha male” in the 2000 election); for writing in New York Magazine that the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom had sexually harassed her 20 years prior; and for her Occupy Wall Street arrest in a diaphanous gown (she crossed police lines coming from a SoHo movie premiere). It didn’t help her reputation in the liberal circles that anointed her when she told The Sunday Herald in 2006 that during therapy for writer’s block she had a vision in which she took the form of a teenage boy and met Jesus — this from a woman who describes herself as “a traditional Jewish girl.”

In the meantime, she divorced David Shipley (a former editor of The New York Times Op-Ed page), her husband for 15 years, ushered their daughter and son into adolescence, and returned to Oxford to study Victorian and Edwardian literature. Along with the books and two columns (she writes a monthly one for Project Syndicate), she commands high fees as a speaker (represented by Royce Carlton, a Ritz of agencies), recently discussing the clitoris at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, adding female sexual response to a topic list that includes citizen uprisings and eating disorders.

When asked how she manages the volume of her work, Ms. Wolf paused before responding: “I don’t have a choice. I’m a single mother of two from a lower middle-class family, but it’s manageable: hard work is working in a coal mine.”

She was raised in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco by her anthropologist mother and her father, a Romanian-born scholar on gothic horror novels and the subject of her book “The Treehouse.” Her uncle is Dan Goleman, a popular neuroscience writer who Ms. Wolf said was influential in writing her latest book.

She has also fallen in love with Avram Ludwig, a movie producer with a Battery Park City sailboat mooring and, as readers of “Vagina” know, the skill to deliver orgasms that make the leaves outside her bedroom at her upstate home glow in “Wizard of Oz” Technicolor. But in discussing a book inspired by her own sex life, she reveals little of herself, steering the talk back to statistics (30 percent of women, she said, can’t “reliably” reach orgasm).

“The sexual revolution is not working for women, many women, or not working well enough,” Ms. Wolf said, her voice rising. “To me that’s a feminist issue that we’re not reaching our potential.”

She also called women’s imperfect realization of their sexuality “a human rights crisis,” affecting (this from the book) their ability to “create, explore, communicate, conquer, and transcend.”

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It’s a lot to pin on a vagina. And Ms. Wolf’s sprawling methodology, which includes a tantric healer who engages in “yoni tapping,” and a survey of 19th-century literature that asserts that female writers’ best work accompanies transformative pleasure, has raised questions among scientists as well as reviewers.

As Ms. Wolf wrote, she “stumbled upon hugely important scientific discovery after hugely important scientific discovery,” proving what she described as a “profound brain-vagina connection.” After reading the book, Beverly Whipple, best known as the scientist who discovered the G-spot, said: “At best, this is a very troubling interpretation of science. I can’t find the data behind her claims. Where is she getting this? Is this fiction or nonfiction?”

When asked if she may have taken liberties with her research for narrative effect, Ms. Wolf’s blue eyes hardened.

“I have all these books here,” she said, clicking off to a room in the back of her apartment and returning with a guide to last year’s meeting of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. She flipped through it until she found the write-up of a panel that included Dr. Whipple.

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Ms. Wolf at her home in Millerton, N.Y.Credit
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Dr. Whipple commented that she had given a presentation on another topic and expressed surprise that Ms. Wolf did not interview her or her collaborator.

“I just didn’t know that she would be available to me,” Ms. Wolf said, later admitting that she had not attended the conference. Looking at her bookshelves stacked with works by Abbie Hoffman, Jane Fonda and John Stuart Mill, she defended her research. “I’m drawing my own conclusions,” she said. “My job is to notice echoes and notice resonances.” She added: “Scientists are not supposed to do the same thing that cultural critics do.”

Jim Pfaus, a professor at Concordia University in Portland, Ore., whose research on the sexual proclivities of rats figures prominently in the book and who said he has read three drafts of it, said in an interview that he welcomed the controversy, and seemed to care little if Ms. Wolf actually got the science right.

“I think it’s entirely possible that Naomi is overstating the case for emphasis, but when you piss enough people off, you reach a critical threshold for people to be talking about it and working on it,” he said.

Or as the sex therapist Nancy Fish, who is also quoted in the book, put it, “People sometimes have to go to extremes to get people to talk about a topic.”

She added: “In 2012 we’re still living in the Victorian age when it comes to sexuality. Vagina has to be a household word. It should be a topic discussed at the dinner table when you’re having a dinner party.”

It will be a long time before readers of the new book hear the words “dinner party” without thinking of “Vagina.” Not because of Judy Chicago’s gynocentric artwork “Dinner Party,” a beloved touchstone for Ms. Wolf, but because of the party an unnamed friend gave to celebrate the book deal for “Vagina,” published by Ecco.

She wrote that when she arrived, guests were shaping homemade pasta dough into vulvas. Sausages sizzled on the stove, salmon fillets graced a platter. Her “depression that a friend would think this was funny,” Ms. Wolf wrote, rendered her unable to “type a word of the book — not even research notes for six months.” Her writer’s block was explained by what she said was the book’s “big message.”

“When you honor a woman’s sexuality,” she wrote, “you support her intellectual creativity; when you threaten and insult her sexuality and her very sex, you do exactly the opposite.”

In England, the book is already No. 7 on one best-seller list, despite negative press. Sales figures are not yet available in the United States, where this year State Representative Lisa Brown, a Democrat, was censored for saying “vagina” in the Michigan House of Representatives, and where more recently, Representative Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, ascribed powers to female anatomy that he said could suppress the sperm of a rapist.

“This is a time in which everybody is on the verge of a global awakening from a certain kind of torpor,” she said, eyes sparkling. “That’s why there’s this doubling down on the power struggle over the vagina. But this is a moment for women. We are going to have to reclaim the vagina as central to everything.”

Whether or not that happens, many people certainly will be talking about vaginas at this weekend’s dinner parties, and perhaps soon they won’t talk just about Naomi Wolf’s.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2012, on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Another Debate (On Sex, Of Course). Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe